Twitter Says its Users Buy Twice As Many Cars

Twitter, Inc. is seeking a bigger slice of the more than US$15 billion auto-advertising market, saying that households with users of its service were twice as likely to buy a new car as the average U.S. household. About six percent of households with Twitter users bought a new car during a six-month period measured by partner Datalogix, Inc. in 2013, the San Francisco, CA-based social network said in a blog post. Those households bought new vehicles at double the national rate from April to October 2013, according to Datalogix and IHS Automotive’s Polk. The car-buying data “moves the conversation from ‘why Twitter?’ to ‘how should we use Twitter?’” said Jeffrey Graham, ad research director at Twitter. “The measurement shows that Twitter works and there’s a huge opportunity there.” Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, is focused on reversing a slowdown in user growth. The more significant measure to monitor is the company advertising revenue given the “tremendously under-developed potential for monetization” of the platform, according to Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group in New York.